Aesthetic Problems at the Pachecos

In the next room, twelve year old Esmerelda is playing piano—she is supposed to be practicing but as is often the case, she got diverted.  She is playing an old jazz tune by Billie Holiday, ‘God Bless the Child’, and it seems everyone would agree:  She does it very well.

In the living room, teenagers Fiona, Kloe, Sancho, Jamie,  and Madgie are listening, as is Manuel, Esmerelda’s father who loves to engage the kids in discussion.  Gia and Estephen are upstairs, Gia being Esmerelda’s younger sister, four, Estephen being her older brother, seventeen.  Their mum is sitting in another room with Sancho, Manuel’s uncle.  Esmerelda now finishes playing ‘God Bless the Child’, and gets on with the dreary but necessary business of practicing scales.

At the moment Esmerelda finishes the tune, Jamie says,

‘Wow … I love that…that’s so good.’ 

Manuel’s ears prick up.

              ‘Good?’, he asks.

              ‘Yeah, good’.

              ‘In what way?, Manuel presses further.

              ‘Umm … the feeling, I guess. The emotion… so sad.’

Manuel is not impressed.

              ‘But who is it that is so sad? Do you think Esmermalda is crying over the keyboard?’

              ‘Well, no, but …’.

              ‘And consider a woman who weeps over her dead child. Is that not sad, more sad than the music? Indeed isn’t it a perfect example of sadness?’

              ‘Yes of course’, Jamie replies.

              ‘Is that the sort of thing you were saying of Esmerelda’s piano playing?’

              ‘Well no… got me. .. The woman crying is painful to listen to; Esmerelda’s playing sounds good, like a stillness comes over me’.

              ‘Then the music is pleasant to hear?’, ask Manuel.

              ‘Yeah’.

‘Like the taste of chocolate, or a head massage?’

‘Yeah, I guess so’.

Fiona had been listening to the conversation with mounting agitation.

‘But this cannot be what you mean!’, said Fiona.  Chocolate is something you eat; you can’t eat music! Or consume it at all! I mean you can listen to it but you don’t use it up, it’s still there afterwards.  Anyway to think that way is to demean music; it is to disrespect Esmerelda!  Music is something higher!’

Manuel was excited by this.

‘Really?’, said Manuel. ‘And what is this something higher of which you speak?’

‘That’s funny, I thought you’d know, Mr. Smarty Pants. Well it’s simple: It’s the same as any good deed’, said Fiona.

‘So musical goodness is the same as moral or ethical goodness?’, ask Manuel.

‘Yes, silly, if you want to drag in other words, go right ahead!’.

              ‘So the music and say, a rich man giving his fortune away to the poor, are both …’

              ‘Wait a minute’, said Madgie, getting into the act, cutting off Manuel.

“Esmerelda’s piece is nice to hear, everyone agrees about that.  It’s good.  But it’s just a conflation of words to think that since ‘good’ applies to the music and to an act like the rich man’s giving his fortune away, they must have something in common, rather than its being an accident of language.”

‘Ah, good! Do go on’, said Manuel.

‘Well I was just going to add that the main difference between the music and the good action is that music doesn’t really have a purpose beyond itself—you know, “art for art’s” sake, there is something right about that idea—but obviously the rich man’s gift was for the purpose of relieving suffering.  Music is not generated by a template, according to a preconceived plan. I mean music can have purposes—sometimes we put on music for dancing, or for ceremonies and the like, but it isn’t intrinsic to music that it have any purpose. It can be purposeless!’

Kloe now saw an opening.  There was something bothering her.

‘I think that’s a nice idea but it doesn’t add up.  If it doesn’t have any purpose, then what’s it for?  It just would be meaningless noise!  I think everyone has to relate it to their own experiences, and if it stirs up your experiences, then that tells you what it means. That song … it reminded me of my grandfather, somehow’.

‘And what of the goodness of the music?’, inquired Manuel.

‘You mean what is the goodness of music?  Well, the more it means, the better it is!’, replied Kloe.

‘But what if I relate the music to very shallow experience, and you relate it to a comparatively  profound one? The same music cannot be both shallow and profound’,  Madgie piped up.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean … I mean the music might be better for one person than for another. Goodness—in music, and I suppose in art in general—is … relative? Is that the word I want, Manuel?’

Manuel nodded.

Kloe went on:

‘Yes:  It’s a question—it’s not a question of the goodness of a piece of music, but a question of the goodness of it for a person. It is relative to each person. And I suppose is has to be relative to a person and the time at which you listen to it, because, speaking just for myself anyway, sometimes music leaves me cold, other times the same music sounds great .‘

              Jamie sputtered into life.

              ‘But listen, didn’t you, Kloe, want to say that music is—that you’ve got to relate it to your own experience? I say I like that, and if Madgie’s right that it leads to—what you call it?’

              Madgie hesitated.

              ‘To relativism about taste, is the term it’s generally known as’, Manuel said.

              ‘Thanks’—Jamie resumed—‘to relativism about taste, then, that’s all right with me. Seems commonsense if you ask me.’

              ‘Well I don’t like it’, interjected Fiona.  ‘I mean I like the relativism part, but I don’t like the thought that I’ve got to link the music with my own experiences.  I fact I don’t link the music we’ve just heard with any past experiences of mine, yet I still like the music. I still think it’s good music.’

              At this point little Gia, Esmerelda’s little sister, piped up, having just entered the room from upstairs along with her brother Estephen.

‘Not good music!’, said Gia.

‘No?’, said Fiona; ‘Why not?’.

 ‘When she does piano I can’t go in there and there’s nothing for me to do!’

Madgie tried to help:

‘Gia, good little Gia; don’t you think that your sister played a good song?’

‘NO! I hate that song! She always plays it and everyone goes quiet and I hate that song.’

Manuel takes Gia by the hand, laughing, ‘Oh Gia, you've given us a perfect example of a  judgement which fails to be aesthetic judgement because it fails to be disinterested.’

Gia seemed pleased by this.

Madgie asked the obvious question:  ‘What does that mean?’

Manuel resumed. “If your judgement—your response—to a work of art, in this case to a musical piece, is determined by some practical concern of yours, then it is prejudiced, biased, or not ‘disinterested’ (‘disinterested’ in the sense of ‘not having a personal motive’, for example we want our legal judges to be dis-interested).  If it is interested as Gia’s was, or you have a bet riding on it or whatever, then your response to the work is not properly speaking a response to the work itself, but is polluted by your own cares with no intrinsic connection to the work. So it not an aesthetic judgement, not an aesthetic response, at all. How about that, Gia?’ 

Gia squealed with delight.

‘And Gia, you’re just jealous of your sister’, Manuel went on; ‘that very personal feature of your relation to the player of the piece determined your lack of an aesthetic response’.

Gia didn’t know the word ‘jealousy’ but she instinctively didn’t like it, and did the curled-lower-lip-and-arms-crossed show of defiance.  But Manuel’s smile won the day, especially when he added,

‘Anyway, very soon we’ll start you on the violin, and then you can get a lot attention with it.’

Gia wriggled free, jumped in Manuel’s arms for a brief hug, then went to look for her Mum.  Manuel now noticed that Estephan had not contributed.

‘Estephan! Why are you so uncharacteristically silent? I would have thought the conversation would appeal to you more than anyone’.

Everyone knew that Estephan not only played the drums—especially the timbales—but was constantly listening to jazz as well as Latin and Salsa bands, liked to read philosophy, as well as being a devoted older brother of Esmerelda. 

‘Surely you can apply a modicum of your vast knowledge to sort out our pickle.  Which view attracts you the most—Jamie’s, Fiona’s,  Chloe’s, or Madgie’s? Or do you have some other view?’

Estephan hesitated.  ‘Well … ‘, he began sheepishly…’You really want to know what I think?’.

‘Yes of course! Let it all hang out, man’.  Manuel sometimes indulged the language of his youth.

‘This will really surprise you I guess’, said Estephen, ‘and please don’t get me wrong—I love my sister and .. I love what she’s doing on the piano—but I really don’t think ‘God Bless the Child’, that’s the song she played, is her best.  Far from it.  Many things are wrong with it—I could play various versions on the speakers to show you what I mean—and other songs that she plays are much better. ‘Body and Soul’ is a more difficult song but somehow she plays it really well, even if not by heart and she always screws up the last bar of the bridge, the middle eight. I know everyone here—except Gia!—likes her rendition of ‘God Bless the Child’, but I suppose I don’t really’. 

‘See?’, Kloe spoke up. ‘I’m right then. It’s relative!’.

Jamie was pleased at this, although he always went along with Kloe’s opinions.

But not everyone agreed. 

‘No way!’, Madgie was becoming heated now. ‘Jamie you always go along with Kloe just because you fancy her!  Anyway it can’t be just that our opinions can’t be right or wrong, that it’s like liking butterscotch, or being allergic to cats .. like cats make you sneeze but don’t make me sneeze, and neither one of us is right or wrong.  We can argue about … pieces of music, about … what do I want to say?’

‘We can have rational disagreements concerning aesthetic merits and demerits’, Manuel interjected. ‘Not so of liking butterscotch’.

“Right, what he said… and like … well for example I just don’t agree with Estephan.   I think he’s wrong!  It’s too much the opinion of a nerd, just technical reasons.  And Kloe I think you’re just kidding yourself.   This idea of relativism is just a cop out, a way of shutting down the discussion with ‘Well it’s just a matter of opinion, eh?’ I think there is something we’re disagreeing about, even though I can’t quite say what it is.  Indeed I think that just as people are better and worse at say doing the hula-hoop or doing long division, I think that people are better and worse at detecting this quality, or these qualities… they can at least be ranked”.

This caused everyone to speak at once.  They managed at last to drown out Esmerelda’s practicing.

During this whole time, sitting in next room sitting with Barbara—Gia, Estephan and Esmerelda’s mum (and Manuel’s wife)—and Manuel’s uncle Sancho had been listening intermittently to the conversation.  Sancho now winked at Barbara, got up, and went into the room where the now fiery conversation, or perhaps it was bordering on a shouting match, was taking place.  When he entered, the conversation ebbed, and the ever genial Manuel greeted him, grasping his arm.

‘I see you have achieved your object, Manny, with this room full of jabbering monkeys’. Sancho said this in such disarming voice, and with such a smile that everyone relaxed and saw the humour. 

‘Allow me.  I will tell you a tale, doesn’t matter whether it’s fact or fiction.  I was once at a grand wedding party, a boda, near San Luis Potosi, in the old country of Mexico.  It had a big Mariachis band,  maybe three hundred guests decked out in their finest, fantastic food and drink, a giant cake embroidered in frosting.  Just after the lanzar el ramo—the throwing of the bouquet—a disagreement broke out around the big wine-butt, a huge container full of vino tinto.  A certain man, Diego I believe was his name,  was complaining about the wine.  Diego was a noted connoisseur of wine, and claimed to taste an odd flavour in the wine, one perhaps of leather, which ruined the wine.  Yet apparently no one would agree with him! In fact they all seemed to agree that fineness of the wine was not in question.  But one person did emerge: Juan, who ran a shop in the village which sold tequila, cervesas,  and vino, that is wine.  Juan often entertained Diego when he got a new wine in; they were good friends, a little famous or infamous for their endless prattle and arguments about wine, food, and music too.  Juan said, a bit shyly, that he too was put off by the wine, at least at first when it had not yet had its effect on him, not because it tasted of leather but because he thought it tasted vaguely of iron.  The others gathered there laughed merrily of course. The fools! they said. You claim to have such excellent, refined tastes! Yet your verdicts are contradictory!  

‘Ha! See Madgie! You’re chasing phantoms! You’re just a snob, aren’t you?’, said Kloe. ‘Relativism wins again!’.

‘Oh but there is more’, Sancho resumed. ‘Towards the end of the party, when the wine-butt was nearly empty, a woman reported feeling some object with the ladle.  Diego went over to her.  Let me see, he said.  The woman fished further for the object, found it again, and drew it up.  It was a key, tied to a leathern thong!  Vindication for Diego and Juan! Their tastes were revealed as finer, more discriminating!’

‘Yes,’ Manuel broke in.  ‘So if it is not a mistake to generalise, the challenge for you Madgie is just to articulate what the equivalent property is to the leathern thong.  And even if you can’t, that does not disprove your claim that aesthetic taste can be ranked according to how well they track a certain quality. You would just be unable to name it; you would be in the same boat as we were before we found that tuberculosis is caused by bacteria.’

Esmerelda now emerged from the practice room and sat on the floor.

Manuel continued. ‘Esmerelda we were just having an animated conversation partly in response to your playing, in response to  the question of what we really mean by our saying that your playing of ‘God Bless the Child’ is good.  We wonder whether, and in what way, such statements can be correct or incorrect.  We can call this for short the Nature of Aesthetic Judgement,  We have conflicting views! 

‘First there is the relativist position, Kloe’s position.  When I say ‘This is good’ of a work of art, what I really mean is ‘For me, this is good’, or ‘I like it’.  So if I like it but you don’t, both opinions can be the case.  There is no contradiction, as there would if it were just the question of whether a certain object has certain attribute, in which case it would either have it or lack it, end of story.  One of us would have to be wrong.  The drawback to relativism is that we do argue about songs, performances, works of art generally.  Are we always wrong to do so? Are we just confused in doing so? Or are we, as Kloe accused Madgie of being, snobs, in thinking that aesthetic response can be vindicated, or go wrong? 

Then there were Jamie’s initial position, and Fiona’s.  Jamie wanted to link the goodness of the piece, perhaps its beauty, with its emotional qualities, with expression.  This seemed to have trouble because no one is literally in the emotional state that is associated with the work.  No one is literally sad.  Then he seemed to equate taste for music or art generally with the gratification of the gustatory taste. He might be right in the end but it does seem that Fiona had point in saying that hearing is very different from eating; eating is a necessity, and we grow satiated by eating.  The desire for music is very different; we may grow tired but not satiated, not filled up with it, there is nothing like a stomach involved!  Fiona on other hand wanted to collapse goodness in art into moral goodness.    But Madgie pointed out that art needn’t have any purpose at all, whereas good acts are always done purposefully; that is, one can justify, give a reason for, what one does.  It seemed wrong to think of art in terms of a reproducible template, as always made according to a definite recipe, whereas it does seem that good acts are a matter of following rules.

‘We saw from considering the response of dear little Gia that it appears that aesthetic response must be disinterested—that is, taken without thought of gains or losses that might accrue to one personally. It is sometimes put as the requirement that one’s response must be independent of one’s own desires.

‘And finally we learned from Sancho’s story of the leathern thong that there is some hope for the Madgies of this world, that one can tolerate disagreement about individual works of art in thinking that there is nevertheless an answer, even if one is as yet unable to formulate it.’

              Dinner was now ready; Fiona had to go, but Madgie, Chloe, and Jamie were only too pleased to dine as guests of the Pacheco family on enchiladas de pollo, refritos frijoles, and rice.

Suggested Reading

David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. Selected Essays (OUP 1995) pp. 133-153.
R. C. Collingwood, The Principles of Art.  (Clarendon 1938)
Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form. (Routledge, 1953).
 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement. (Oxford 1952).